Listening to Trees: A Circle of Life

Growing up in the dry, barren hills and valleys of Oman, I rarely encountered trees. When I say "saw," I mean they didn't really register in my mind. I was always drawn to the landscape's rocks and the ocean, preferring them over the few small, sparse desert trees scattered across the terrain. Only after I moved to greener cities did I start to notice trees and then, subsequently, appreciate them more keenly. My interest in photography grew, and over the years, my camera roll became filled with pictures of trees I encountered wherever I went.

Trees have now become an integral aspect of my life, becoming a treasure mine of inspiration. They offer immense visual richness — in their blossoms, expansive canopies, sculptural leaves, and the twisting trunks or gnarled bark that first drew me in. Yet, at the beginning, they were mostly beings I engaged with from a distance. It felt as though only the eye could fully honour their beauty, as if vision alone held the key to recognizing their presence.

I still recall the first time I realized that I could listen to trees. It coincided with my move to an apartment complex in Bangalore with a diverse cluster of trees, ranging from young rubber and star fruit saplings to mighty fig and rain trees soaring in the sky.

It was unsurprising that my realization that I could - and should - listen to trees happened during the darkness of night, when trees metamorphosed into inky, secretive beings. I had always been nocturnal, preferring the silence, solitude, and seeming anonymity that night conferred upon me. Just as I discovered new aspects to myself in the quietude of the night, perhaps, the trees did so too, appearing to exist for themselves solely.

One breezy, sleepless night, a few months after moving to Bangalore, as I restlessly tossed and turned in bed, I could hear the trees rustling and murmuring to one another. In my half-asleep state, I listened to the rustling as sounds of waves crashing upon the beach; even though I had not lived by the sea for years, I still yearned and felt homesick for it. It was not a coincidence that my mind instinctively interpreted the rustling of the trees as similar to the sound of the sea's waves. Although I could barely see the canopies in the darkness, I could hear them swaying, and it made me wonder: were they swaying out of joy? Were they swaying to protect themselves from the gradually increasing wind? Whatever the reason, the trees’ music eventually lulled me to sleep, as they would often go on to do so in the future as well.

For the longest time, I simply told everyone that I was just a “visual person” and that sounds or music didn't particularly figure in my life. I had created a narrative that I simply did not align with sound; the excess of it overwhelmed and disoriented me. I attributed it to growing up on a university campus in a desert wadi plain, the air silence-thickened with only the occasional sound of a plane or a night bird interrupting it. For a long time, I believed that I was content in a relatively soundless world. So much so that, when I started using Instagram, I chose iamjustavisualperson as my first handle because I primarily saw and shared the world through a visual lens. Over the years, I have started to live in more sound-rich environments, with India being one of them for the last decade. Here, I wake up to a delightful array of sounds, including the enthusiastic warbling of birds that mixes with the bhajans drifting from nearby temples. When I post videos of trees in motion, I often wonder: how can I begin to convey the layered, sonic presence of trees? Should I even try? And yet, despite the limitations, I feel compelled to. Because if and when trees vanish, they will take entire universes with them, leaving behind an eerie, unfathomable silence.

I have been dwelling on this thought ever since I read an article a few months ago, which haunted me for a long time. It was about an American sound recordist, Bernie Krause, who had recorded an audio clip near a bigleaf maple tree in Sugarloaf Ridge Park, California, every April over two decades between 2003 and 2023. The data he compiled reveals a rich tapestry of sounds from the ecosystem over the decades, until the most eerie clip of them all was recorded in 2023. The clip is of utter and total silence; there was simply no sound to be heard. To deepen the sadness, the bigleaf maple tree too succumbed to a series of the most destructive wildfires California had ever seen in recent years. ‘“It’s a loss, and there’s a longing. I would suspect the birds still miss that tree. I do.”’ Krause is quoted as saying in the article.

The profound silence, along with the horrifying destruction it represented, disrupted what was once a thriving ecosystem. It made me reflect more deeply than ever on the soundscapes I had taken for granted. These sounds, which I had unconsciously experienced, were so familiar that I assumed they would always be present in the future as well. 

Long before I began observing and admiring trees, they were just a giant green blur in the background. This phenomenon is known as plant awareness disparity (also called plant blindness): the human tendency to overlook plant species. In a study arguing for renaming plant blindness as plant awareness disparity, Kathryn Parsley mentions that “most people do not pay attention to plants in their lives…they fail to attend to plants as individual biological units, but rather group them together into a large green backdrop.” It made me think it had taken me so long to register the trees in the first place myself, and in my now almost obsessive visual documentation of virtually every tree I encountered, coupled with the desire to learn about them, it took me so long to think about listening to them as well. The fact is that trees are not the mute creatures we mostly imagine them to be; they make a diverse range of sounds, emitting them particularly when they are in distress, which in turn alerts the other trees. Interdisciplinary artists working across the intersections of art and science are channelling these relatively little-known aspects of trees into interactive large-scale projects; American artist Nikki Lindt, for example, is chronicling the subterranean sounds of an underground forest through her art project, The Underground Sound Project. While listening to the recording of a pine tree, we gain access to an alternative, fantastical universe, a world far removed from the ordinary.

This project led me to an experience that unknowingly sparked my journey into understanding the incredible complexity of trees and their internal sound universe. It all began when I attended a tree festival called “Neralu” (meaning “shade” in Kannada) during my first year in Bangalore. In addition to the many other facts I would learn and come to love about trees, I also had the opportunity to hear a tree’s “heartbeat” through an interactive sound installation, “Proof of Life,” a device implanted in its trunk which picked up the frequencies it emitted. As I hugged the tree, feeling the warmth of its bark against my skin, I found myself accessing its interior life in a way I had not even thought possible, little knowing it would mark the beginning of a new and precious bond forming with the trees.

Each tree sounds different while rustling due to several factors, including wind speed and direction and the type of leaves it has, which depend on factors such as their thickness, firmness, edge outline, and surface texture. There is even a word describing the unique sounds trees make: psithurism.

In my mind, though, each tree sings a unique song, its rhythms and cadences open to myriad interpretations contingent on whoever is listening to it, much like a person encounters a poem or a work of art. Some trees are more loquacious in their songs, others economical, each choosing how much and what to convey. And for some reason, whenever I imagine a concert of singing trees, I imagine them doing so in the stillness of the night, submerged in darkness, when they become entirely different creatures as opposed to their day avatars.

The more I listen to the trees, the more I find it easier to listen to myself. Sometime ago, I sat in a tiny pocket of a Bangalore park one gentle February morning, gazing at the newly leafing spring trees, their leaves gleaming translucent green in the sunshine. I watched the canopies shimmer, sway, and dance; I shut my eyes and let their gentle songs wash upon me amidst the harsh, jarring urban clamour threatening to drown them. As I filtered the urban noise out, gradually centering myself, I wondered what they were saying; I wondered what they were whispering to one another. And as it had often happened when I was alone in the company of trees, I wondered if they would permit me to eavesdrop upon their conversations. And while doing so, I simultaneously found myself navigating a path into myself.

Life is increasingly becoming a collection of cacophonies, whether it's the external sounds pouring into one’s space, the moment you open your phone and encounter reels, or, for many of us, the unending stream of thoughts in our heads. And yet, as much as I resent the almost incessant flow of sounds into my life, I have ironically become anxious in silence. Having spent almost half my life in silence, I have become uncomfortable in the absence of sounds. However, whether it is the loss of decibels I am fearing or the desolation it evokes, I do not know.

With no sounds to focus upon, you have no choice but to examine the texture of your thoughts, their shape and colour, and the questions embedded inside them. Have you been listening to the quiet, rock-steady, calm voice of your intuition? And if you haven’t, why have you stopped doing so? The answer can be unsettling, and perhaps, the only antidote to the discomfort is to nullify the silence.

And yet, as I sit below the trees, listening to them dance, I find myself approaching my thoughts from a space of contemplation and peace as opposed to fear. As the trees nudge you to listen to them, to still your mind, I locate an island of calm within myself that I so struggle with to create any other time or place. In this island, I feel safe, centered, and inhabiting a quiet which invites me to introspect deeply and tenderly about my life. I am inaccessible to everything and everyone else; I am accessible to only myself. As I gaze upwards and lose myself in the trees’ songs, I find myself in flight, journeying up to the treetop and reposing amid the wind and the leaves. And in that moment, everything is clear.

Perhaps, I had been listening all this time: I just needed a rustle to tell me what I truly needed to listen to.